California SB 928: California State University faculty members and instructors of record must be human beings

Summary

Senate Bill 928, signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom on the evening of 27 August 2026, "will require that a faculty member and an instructor of record for a course must be human beings" across the 22-campus California State University system, in the words of its author, Senator Sabrina Cervantes (D-Riverside). It extends to the CSU the safeguards Cervantes wrote for the California Community Colleges in AB 2370 (2024) and SB 241 (2025). Sponsored by the California Faculty Association, which represents about 29,000 CSU academic staff, and by the California Federation of Labor Unions, the bill passed the Senate unanimously in April and drew no recorded opposition. The CFA's bargaining chair described it as "entirely prophylactic"; reporting on the bill placed it against the CSU's system-wide ChatGPT Edu agreement with OpenAI and a 2025 episode at Sacramento State in which template syllabus language suggested AI could stand in for counselling. As far as this collection can find, it is the first statute anywhere to regulate AI substitution for university teaching staff.

Implications for animation education

For animation and illustration programs inside the CSU (San Jose State's Animation/Illustration program is the best known), the statute fixes a boundary that institutional AI strategies elsewhere leave open: an AI system may support teaching but may not be the instructor of record. For faculty developers and union representatives outside California it is a ready-made reference point when AI tutors, automated feedback systems or "AI teaching assistants" are proposed at scale, and its community-college predecessors show the pattern spreading by sector. It does not restrict AI tools used by human staff, so course-level AI policy, assessment design and the use of generative tools in studio teaching are unaffected. Programs should read the operative wording before citing it, since this entry does not yet reproduce the statutory text.

Related items

• ArtCenter College of Design: Position and Policy on Generative AI
• Assuring quality learning in a gen AI-integrated future: The role of adaptive capabilities
• California SB 1050: disclosure of synthetic performers in video and audio advertising

Source

Source: California State Senate (Office of Senator Sabrina Cervantes) ↗ (Policy Text)

Primary document: leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260SB928 ↗